“... is mild domestic psychosis and there are soft furnishings. All art is the art of real estate and self-help. The universe described is a middle-class America, a place of spiritual lassitude and window-blinds. Market populism travels in through the air-conditioning and fastens to the red blood cells. And in these lives, and in the books and films that venture ...”

“... the Nazi commitment would not slacken, that the search for a solution one way or another to this self-imposed problem would not fade away into obscurity or be indefinitely postponed. No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as Hitler did himself. Note the ‘...”

“... to able to be speak for a whole tribe. The basic social unit was the tiyospaye, an economically self-sufficient village or lodge group of interrelated families that acted together during the year. Although this sort of complexity makes it difficult to associate any modern tribal identity with prehistoric sites, Gibbon carefully and convincingly links the ...”

“... to its meaning. Merton (who was himself a gifted minter of new words and phrases, including ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and ‘focus group’), and Elinor Barber, a historian, set out to chart the picaresque career of ‘serendipity’ in the 1950s, when the word had crossed over from the realm of literary arcana to that of scientific buzzwords, but had ...”

“... readers, meanwhile, having availed themselves of the opportunity to indulge, ever so briefly, in self-loathing, put down their newspapers and themselves move on to other things. Nothing has changed, but columnist and readers alike feel better for the cathartic effect of this oblique, reassuring encounter with an alien world. Today, having dissolved any ...”

“... have been the main characters. The parents are, without exception, chronically unhappy and self-obsessed (in The Rules of Attraction, ‘The Freshman band is called The Parents – that’s enough to send out some message to people’s feelers that something wrong is going down’). And the childhood memories that occur fleetingly throughout the novels ...”

“... professionalism in which they conceal themselves behind thickets of technicality and an equally self-indulgent form of popularisation in which the proportion of rhetoric to argument is unduly high. It is, then, something of an event when a book appears in which the central task which laymen demand of the philosopher – that of providing a clear and ...”

“... citizens to cheat, to lie, to fake the results of experiments, and to practise delusion – and self-delusion – on a scale which has almost become institutional? Second, why does society pay so much credulous attention to them? Is it really ‘normal’ for the rest of us to treat tricksters, hysterics, charlatans and practical jokers as if they were ...”

“... the order and decorum of its past – puritanical lies, especially, about a former absence of self-indulgent sexual behaviour. Both books report a high incidence of drunkenness and casual violence among the poor, with Britain worse than America, and those who were shocked by the Swinging London of the 1960s and 70s might benefit from reading about the ...”

“... is acceptable and what is agreeable (Healey probably lost the leadership on that distinction). Self-styled men of the centre do not always tolerate associated viewpoints – sometimes the very contrary: they claim that they themselves represent the consensus of public opinion, so that they have the People as well as Reason on their side, and that all ...”

“... and it is hard to see what Unionists could have done except resist Home Rule, not merely from self-interest, but from a purist belief that Home Rule was a corrupt bargain extracted from an already decadent imperial power. There are comparisons to be made here with the Boers in the 1890s and the public posture of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. No wonder ...”

“... of which the axioms were known, not through experiments, but through intuition, revelation and self-evidence. This kind of pure scientist felt one-up on a man who dissected dead animals – a snobbism which has lasted more than 300 years. He quotes Thomas Pratt, one of the founders of the Royal Society, writing in 1667: ‘The first thing that ought to be ...”

“... incapable of acting except foolishly, except when the occasion doesn’t require it, because he is self-bewilderingly odd. There is a character who claims to have no father, only a grandfather, and when that is called an odd omission, cannot see why: he is a type of all Gerhardie’s sympathetic characters, and nearly all of them are sympathetic. The ...”

“... All the quirks and feats of learning, the vaulting ambition of thought, the imperiousness of self-assertion, are grist to Carey’s mill. But the mill produces flour which is actually ground-up millstone. To ask for bread is then assuredly to be given a stone. The poetry is admired for being callous, brutal and pitiless. For Carey hates the thought of ...”

“... themselves and each other, and what happens when events force them ‘to the point where those self-preserving misunderstandings crumble’. From the beginning, when Brabantio before the Venetian Senate reaches out for witchcraft and sorcery to explain his daughter’s elopement, rather than face the fact that she now cares for someone else more than for ...”